Company is hiring hundreds of American workers, building new facilities, and trying to improve efficiency

When you think General Motors Comp. (GM) you probably think of Detroit, Mich. But the domestic automaker is also heavily invested in Texas, where it employes 4,500 people. A two-shift plant in Arlington has 2,500 employees focused on building Chevrolet, GMC and Cadillac SUVs. GM Financial employs 1,800 at various locations across the state. And there's two call centers with a couple hundred employees, as well.

The company today announced plans to build a new IT center in Austin, Texas which will hire 500 professionals. Among the positions GM is looking to fill are software developers, project managers, database experts, and business analysts.

The center will be located just miles from other industry giants, such as Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) largest U.S. call center and Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd.'s (KSC:005930) massive chip fab.

Among other locations, the new Austin data center will help serve GM's large
Arlington, Texas SUV plant. [Image Source: GM]

The IT center is part of GM's bid to centralize its formerly scattered IT efforts, which often operated pseudo-automously on a site-per-site basis pre-bankruptcy. The IT consolidation should both drive cost savings, and -- according to GM -- "drive breakthrough ideas". GM says the Austin center is the "first of several new IT Innovation Centers".

We want IT to keep up with the imagination of our GM business partners, and to do that, we plan to rebalance the employment model over the next three years so that the majority of our IT work is done by GM employees focused on extending new capabilities that further enable our business.

We anticipate hiring as many as 500 new GM employees in Austin. We look to the Innovation Centers to design and deliver IT that drives down the cost of ongoing operations while continuously increasing the level and speed at which innovative products and services are available to GM customers.

The next generation of IT workers, the talented visionaries we want contributing at the Innovation Center, are being trained at top computer science schools in Texas and surrounding states. The IT Innovation Centers are critical to our overall IT business strategy and transformation.

II. Bailout Benefits Finally Being Realized?

GM is also adding a third shift to its Arlington plant, which could raise wages for some and add at least a few hundred more well-paying skilled labor jobs, which come with health care benefits and a pension. GM is also opening a $200M USD part stamping plant which will "create or retain approximately 180 jobs".

GM IT workers (L-R) Dan Krzywosinski, Neal Bond and Michelle Lauka try to resolve a client issue at a data center in Warren, MI. The workers will soon be getting new colleagues in Texas, courtesy of a GM IT hiring/improvement effort. [Image Source: GM]

Ultimately the U.S. government estimates its losses on the bailout of GM, Chrylser, Ford, and industry parts suppliers to be around $25.1B USD. However, that figure does not account for preserved spending power and taxable GDP -- which will likely return billions to the government. In the end it's clear that something was lost, but something was gained as well in the auto bailout.